Ask Lemmy

As someone who never played the games as a kid, I can be more or less impartial in saying that Mario Bros. was probably the gaming industry's big break.

Guild Wars (the original) Just so nostalgic to me. Gameplay is fun even after all these years.

earthbound. my first RPG that I understood, plus SNES is GOAT.

It has its flaws but I've never had more fun than playing halo 3 custom games back in the day. You could do and make almost anything! I haven't felt that playing any game since.

Gothic 2.

Marathon, by Bungie. From the box it came in, to the hugeness of the spaceship, the coolness of the story, all the secrets, and the fan community that sprang up to research and theorize.

And then they made it open source so anybody could play it on any computer.

It's not favorite game to play any more, but it was the greatest game to me.

Ocarina of time. All Zelda games since are to some degree compared to it in terms of how successful it is monetarily, gameplay and story-wise. So many modern adventure games are based on this one game. It’s the game that finally made target tracking in 3D work. It’s so well thought out, that a blind streamer is able to play the game probably better than I ever will. If most common people know of “zelda” it’s because of this game. There are so many memes from Zelda in general. It’s one of the few games from my childhood that I will replay for the rest of my life.

Dark Souls remastered taught me how to look at life differently. I now accept failure as part of the process of growing, not something that should be avoided at all costs.

Also it taught me how to parry like a G.

ET for Atari, classic.

Just cause three. blow shit up, kill bad guys, just enough story to explain it all. even better, it strikes a good balance of minimal story and compelling story, which a lot of games like that kinda suck at.

Since everyone's just saying their favorite game, I'll say The Finals!

It's fuckin great! It's the first FPS in years that gets me legit excited to play. I like that the game requires decent strategy, movement, and teamwork to get wins and not just good aim/luck. Everything about it feels fresh. Best of all it's freaking free. A free AAA game in 2024 that's more than decent and has an awesome dev team? Sign me up!

It's wild to me that it's not huge compared to games that go mainstream (not gonna mention names. lol), but I'll appreciate it while it's here.

Ultima IV. All the JRPG stuff started here.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. (Chronicle is a close second)

Puyo Puyo Tsu is the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made. Such a simple set of mechanics gives way to an incredible amount of depth. I think its greatest strength relative to the rest of the genre is how much importance it places on actually paying attention to and adapting to your opponent. Some of my favorite other puzzle games are guilty of feeling more like a game I play adjacent to my opponent rather than against them, and I'll give them a pass if the core gameplay loop is fun enough, but I consider Tsu king of the genre for having the most true versus in its versus mode.

But Tsu's skill curve is terrifyingly impenetrable for beginners, it's one of the hardest competitive puzzle games to learn. Just understanding how to make chains is extremely daunting, and that is but the tip of the iceberg. Paying attention to what your opponent is up to while still being able to concentrate on what you're doing is an order of magnitude harder, and that's kind of where the real game begins.

20th shines by being the most comprehensive package full of additional content for players of all skill levels alongside the classic Tsu ruleset. There's a whopping 20 different game modes to play around in, many of which are much more immediately fun for a beginner to pick up, get hooked on, and hopefully enjoy the game enough to want to eventually learn to scale the mountain that is Tsu later.

Sadly, this game never got released in the west, and none of the games that have come anywhere close to it. And I think that's a large part of why the series is struggling to gain any kind of recognition in the west, we've never seen the best of what it has to offer.

Twisted Metal or Resident Evil

Quake 1.

The game is kinda meh, but the modability spawned an endless amount of awesome stuff to this day. Even Half-life is basically just a Quake mod.